It breaks my heart to say this but I am sick and tired of having to listen to fat cat rentiers whinging on and on about their profit margins.

Foxwatcher commented
2016-02-07 14:20:54 +0000

Not brainwashed, James. Just weighing the facts and coming to a conclusion that is obvious to everyone not on the gravy train. Try looking at it from someone, anyone, else’s perspective, and put your bank statements to one side. I concede that there are practical issues which will need to be addressed, but they should never have been allowed to develop in the first place. The fact that they DO exist should not be presented as a defence by those benefitting from the injustice caused. You’re just hiding behind a convenient shield. Little point in discussing an issue with someone whose head is so far in the sand and who’s probably got a whole lifestyle and life plan based on this selfishness.

James McKindley commented
2016-02-07 14:17:46 +0000

Well Paul Taylor, what can I say. I’m not whining on about margins at all. I’ve been quite happy never increasing rents on a tenant in situ but Osborne is forcing it. And now, I will have to do so on an annual basis because it is generally accepted that rents will have to go up by 25 to 30% by 2020. That can’t be done in one go so will cause most landlords to increase by about 5% annually. I have one property that I’ve owned for years and always let it out at the same rent despite having had several tenants in it over that time. I have just re-let it and would have done so at the same price but I can no longer do that. It’s been let very quickly at nearly 15% higher than the old price. My only motive there was to prepare myself for the effects of C24, and that’s the way it is regardless of what you believe.

James McKindley commented
2016-02-07 14:12:34 +0000

I’m still not getting though here am I? I’ve previously offered to meet you and show you the numbers but you declined, well actually you mostly ignored the offer and probably because you’re scared of being proven wrong because you love to claim that landlords are making vast profits. Now I point you at lots of good references that will also show you that your campaign is misplaced. But most of all you still haven’t grasped that it’s not landlords that will be ‘sucking the life’ out of the tenants, it’s George Osborne. Do you still not understand that this isn’t a little tax change, it’s one ENORMOUS deviation from how every other business in the land is taxed. Osborne himself has said elsewhere that a tax on turnover is wrong, yet here he is tantamount to doing it. Mortgaged landlords have choices about the extra tax burden.

1. Absorb it, which they will only be able to do if their mortgages are very small and/or they charge extremely high rents. Actually they can also do so if they’re prepared to subsidise the shortfall from other income, but why should they do that? In Australia you can actually offset a loss from rental income against other income so that encourages low rents. You can’t do that here. Indeed in pretty much every European country other than this taxation encourages the private sector to invest in property. If we’d had the same regime here as most of them we may not even have a housing crisis because so much investment would have gone into it.

2. Sell up. That in most cases will mean evicting tenants. Mostly it’ll be the poor performing properties that cannot survive this attack and that is particularly those properties that house HB tenants. So they will throw themselves at Councils who are already coping with the worst situation of temporary accommodation and associated costs that we’ve ever seen. I can tell you that most councils across the land are all too aware at how serious this Osborne attack is and they are extremely worried. But that is what you want FW! You want families ripped out of their homes, some of them have been in them for years. You want kids taken out of schools because the only alternative accommodation is miles away. You want families split up because there isn’t temporary accommodation that can house them all. You want to give them all that and no hope of them finding other homes because landlords can no longer afford to take HB. Even if there are landlords that can do so because their mortgage commitments are so low, they can only house one family, and that’s all fine from your point of view. That is what you are proposing by your desire for landlords to sell up. That really is so sad. And all this is OK because FW wants to buy a house.

On top of that Osborne is doing it himself with the pay to stay policy. How do you feel about that then? He’s doing what you accuse landlords of doing in increasing rents and squeezing the blood out of the tenants. Yet James Fraser (the last Property 118 link I sent) and I, like many other professional landlords do our best to keep rents down low.

3. Upgrade tenants. Yes that’s as callous as it sounds. If a tenant can’t afford the Osborne imposed tax they will have to be replaced with ones that can. See above for the other options.

4. Increase rents. Like I keep telling you all the extra rent is going to Government coffers. Please understand that and stop going on about landlords bleeding the tenants dry. I’ve covered most of this situation already.

Osborne is completely aware of what will happen due to C24. It happened in Ireland and he used to bleat on about how good the Irish economy was so he knows full well what will happen, though later when the economy collapsed he did a complete U turn. He doesn’t care about landlords and he doesn’t care about tenants. It’s all about getting the tax in. If landlords sell up he’ll get CGT, if they incorporate he’ll get CGT and SDLT, if they choose to put rents up then he’ll take all that as IT instead. Open your eyes, he is not a super hero that is going to whisk you away to Never Never Land. He is selling off the country’s assets that have been around for hundreds of years in some cases. Mostly these assets bring in millions of pounds a year but they’re being sold to facilitate his only priority of paying down the deficit. Can you really not see that C24 and everything else is just about that? You have been brainwashed.

Paul Taylor commented
2016-02-07 14:01:29 +0000

It breaks my heart to say this but I am sick and tired of having to listen to fat cat rentiers whinging on and on about their profit margins.

Foxwatcher commented
2016-02-07 13:33:33 +0000

I do agree with you that the Chancellor is probably aware of the effect these measures will have. He probably gives BTL landlords more respect than I do, in that he thinks they’ll play fair and absorb these costs, or get out of the market and free up property for owner occupiers. I think he’s wrong here, and that BTLs will suck the life out of their tenants, and then blame the government for the resulting social issues.

Section 21 is the leading cause of statutory homelessness. This law allows evictions with no reason needed, and this is one more reason why we should scrap it.

To some extent, this is stating the bleeding obvious. Since 2012, the end of a private tenancy has been the leading cause of homelessness cases accepted by local authorities, but until now no one has specifically pointed the finger at Section 21. Today, we've been able to demonstrate it.

The latest English Housing Survey was out last week, and the results are further evidence for what we’ve been arguing for years: England’s rental laws are making life insecure and expensive for growing numbers of people.

It is less than a month since we launched our joint campaign - with ACORN, the New Economics Foundation and the London Renters Union - to end section 21 no-fault evictions, and we've already had some major successes.

It allows us a moment to celebrate the first success of the End Unfair Evictions campaign: an acceptance by the government that private tenancy law is failing England's tenants - just as our petition passes 40,000 signatures.

Leaving the detail of the policy to one side for now, it is significantly the first time the government has considered a change to tenancy law. Up to now ministers have been talking of merely "encouraging" landlords to offer better terms - while most landlords might do this, a lot of tenants would get no benefit. We have been arguing that we need full reform and, while incentives are still an option, mandatory reform is now on the table.

One reason we're doing is that existing protections are not working in practice.

Back in 2014/15, we fought a hard campaign alongside Shelter, GMB Young London and others to give tenants basic protection from eviction when they complained about their landlord.

The resulting measures in the Deregulation Act 2015 stopped landlords from serving a Section 21 eviction notice to tenants if the council had found hazards in the property and served an appropriate improvement notice on the owner. This protection lasted for 6 months and was meant to give tenants more confidence in getting their landlord to fix health and safety problems, because the landlord can no longer simply retaliate by kicking them out.

Two million tenants in London will welcome the fact that getting a fairer deal for private renters is one of the Mayor of London’s five priorities for housing in the London Housing Strategy, which was published at the end of May. Given that Sadiq Khan’s housing powers are highly limited, what is his strategy promising to private renters in London?

The Tenant Fees Bill had its second reading in Parliament on Monday evening, where it was debated at length by MPs before being passed unanimously through to committee stage. All the issues that we’ve raised as a concern – default fees, the deposit cap, enforcement of the ban on letting fees – were brought up by MPs in the course of the debate.

Landlords can remove tenants without giving a reason. That’s unfair and it needs to change.

Most of England’s 11 million renters are on contracts with fixed terms of six months or a year; after this period has ended, landlords can evict their tenants with just two months’ notice – and without even giving them a reason. These ‘no fault evictions’ were introduced under section 21 of the 1988 Housing Act. Before this, private tenants had much greater security and it was much harder for landlords to evict tenants who paid the rent on time and looked after the property. The government has finally decided to consult on ways of improving renter security, but - while there are some promising aspects to their proposals - they suggest that no-fault evictions will remain. Generation Rent, the New Economics Foundation, ACORN and the London Renters Union are launching a campaign to abolish section 21.

We're pleased to announce some big news at Generation Rent - with the award of three new grants, our campaign's future has been secured for the next three years and we have been able to expand the team with two new members of staff.

We also have three new board members, including a new chair, Ian Mulheirn.